The theme for this month is "Welcome to our curious but beautiful world", as suggested by robbon44 and 4xxxx who won the July 2012 competition. Be sure to read the whole post for the rules.

In robbon44 and 4xxxx's own words:

"We have had a bit of a chat and we are both pretty new to this but we think we have an idea for the assignment.

Staying slightly topical we thought that with the mars rover landing and taking photos of an alien world, of what and how would an alien race take photos of our world if they landed here.

So our theme would be "welcome to our curious but beautiful world".

We are looking for people to show photos of what they think our world represents, its technical advances, its natural wonders, its inhabitants from an outsiders point of view. This can be scientific or it can be social curiosity. If you arrived here today what would you see that you think is worthy of taking some further interest in or think wow thats just strange. As a side line why not try taking a photo of your environment as maybe the rover is of mars..

It may be a little open to interpretation but we like the fact that the openness may encourage more people to enter with photos of what they see as being representative of our wondrous, quirky and possibly whacky but most definitely beautiful world.

With respect to rules we simply ask that photos be kept as simple as possible, let the image do the talking and keep post processing as simple as you can. Mild HDR is fine as is slight coloring but the idea is we show off our planet in its natural beauty."

The rules!

1: You can only submit one image and it MUST be taken during September 2012. Photos taken earlier will be disqualified!

2: All images submitted must be no more than 1024 pixels on their longest side, although you can include a link to a full resolution version if you like. Flickr users must link back to the original version to comply with its latest rules.

As always, please exercise good judgement on what is suitable for the forum. Keep it clean and family-friendly or it'll be removed. See the Forum Rules for guides.

Please include a sentence or two with your photo describing what you were trying to achieve and if there were any particular challenges in doing so like, for example, any special exposure or lighting setup.

We're all enthusiasts here, so it's also great to see what equipment you used and the settings too. So please also include the following:

Haven't been on the forum in awhile and was perusing this thread on a lazy sunday morning. I thought i would have a nice submission from last week. Someone visiting earth from outer space might be intrigued by the lovely landscape we have as well as the interesting hot air balloons in this picture )

This was a bit of a challenge for me with lighting as the balloons were taking off into the setting sun so i decided to take the picture as a silhouette to be able to get nice exposure of the beautiful sky. This was taken in Ottawa at the annual hot air balloon festival.

I took my new alien friend out to Moreton Island this past weekend, so he can experience life here on Earth in a relaxing, and beautiful, way. He saw a ton of wildlife, including starfish, dolphins, kookaburras, rose-breasted cockatoos (Galah), and tons of fish. He was in awe of how different each and every animal was. I thought about posting a wildlife pic here for this assignment. However, on the last night, my friend was absolutely taken aback by the sunset. Being that the sky in his planet is always the same color, black, he was amazed by the colors and the clouds. Hopefully you all feel the same

Camera Model: Canon 600DLens and focal length: Canon 18-55mm kit lens, at 29mmAperture: 9Shutter Speed: 1/4000Sensitivity: 1250Post processing: Shot in RAW, the only PP was to increase the saturation a tad, and crop a tiny piece off the bottom where I caught someone's head down on the beach

I took my alien friend to the family get together. Just as we were called to the table the evening sky colours changed. The alien commented on how beautiful the sky looked so I took this photo for him.